When comparing Bitbucket vs Heroku, the Slant community recommends Bitbucket for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud storage services for developers?”Bitbucket is ranked 3rd while Heroku is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Bitbucket is:

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories for free, as long as the number of members in a team is not larger than 5. In other words, it does not charge for each number of private repository, instead it charges by the number of team members.

Pros

Pro

Free unlimited private repositories for small teams

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories for free, as long as the number of members in a team is not larger than 5. In other words, it does not charge for each number of private repository, instead it charges by the number of team members.

Pro

Native application for both Mac and Windows

Atlassian, the company behind BitBucket is also behind SourceTree, a free application for Windows and Mac wich works as a client for both Git and Mercurial and can be connected to BitBucket and/or other code hosting services.

Pro

Multiple authentication methods

Pro

JIRA integration

JIRA, the widely used project and issue tracker is developed by Atlassian, the same team that's behind BitBucket.

When the two are integrated, JIRA automatically updates issues when a new commit is made in the BitBucket repo.

Pro

Allows importing existing repositories

BitBucket has a feature which allows users to import an existing repository that has been hosted elsewhere.

The process is very simple, either a service is selected from a dropdown menu and then a repo can be chosen and the URL for a repository can be added in the specified field. Once that's done, the repository is now uploade into BitBucket and can be edited, forked and compared to other repos hosted there.

Pro

Supports hosting static websites

Pro

Atlassian offers student licenses for both students and educators for Atlassian products that will be used in a classroom setting for education. This includes BitBucket, which means that students and teachers can have unlimited private repositories with and unlimited number of contributors.

Pro

Backed by a trustable company that has proved it's worth

BitBucket is developed and maintained by Atlassian, which is not an unknown venture, especially for developers. Atlassian has a great number of other products used by million of users worldwide, including JIRA, HipChat, Confluence and Stash.

Pro

Mercurial support

Pro

Easy Trello integration

You can link BitBucket with your Trello board easily.

Pro

Easy to start with

Getting started with Heroku is very easy. It's a very straightforward procedure and a beginner can set up their first app in two minutes. Often it's just a matter of a couple of git commands and it's all set up and running. The official Heroku docmentation also helps a lot.

Pro

Excellent error logs

When your deploy fails you see a legitimate error log. Many of the other PaaS give you nondescript messages and debugging is a pain. Debugging Heroku wins by comparison.

Pro

Add-ons let you easily add features and technologies

Heroku has a vast list of plugins and services that can be added to an instance. These plugins cover things from databases to email systems. This remove the task of having to install services and setting them up manually. Heroku does it all for you.

Pro

Simple scaling

Heroku instances can easily be scaled up or down by increasing or decreasing the number of available dynos for that instance. This can be done through the CLI or through Heroku's web UI.

Pro

Dedicated build servers

Heroku has dedicated servers for building app dependencies, to ensure that you won't have issues like "out of memory" errors when deploying your app.

Pro

Mature

Heroku is one of the oldest PaaS providers. The fact that it's been around for such a long time means that it had a lot of time to mature over the years. There's also a massive number of articles, guides and tutorials on Heroku out there for beginners and advanced users.

Pro

Free option

Heroku offers a free tier which contains a single dyno instance. It offers 512MB of memory and 100MB swap space.

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Cons

Con

Private repositories are free for only 5 users

Private repositories are free for teams with 5 members or less. If a team is larger, then BitBucket charges for each additional team member.

Con

Proprietary

Con

Not as stable as github

Users have experienced several half a day downtimes, almost every month. True, github is down once in a while, but when GitHub is down complaints breaks loose on Twitter, TechCrunch, and other major media outlets. For the past 5 years github has been down only three times, and two of these times they were attacked by major adversaries.

Con

Requires registration of a "universal atlassian account"

Not a big con for some, but annoying to others.

Con

Constrained by addons

If you want to fully customize your production environment, then Heroku can be seriously constraining. Installing libraries or services can not be done unless there is already a Heroku plugin for it.

Con

Further deployments are slow

While starting with Heroku is fast and easy, and the first few deployments are actually very fast, larger applications tend to have slower deployments. It takes some time for the dynos to restart and while they are restarting the application is completely offline. Which means that you can lose precious seconds of application time.

Con

Really expensive

Heroku starts getting really expensive once you leave that free tier. It's not just the bare Heroku service that is costly, the addons as well are very pricey.

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